Thursday Open Thread

11 thoughts on “Thursday Open Thread”

1. I think I just heard Peter Navarro call the OD the "working class" president. 

   Maybe I was dreaming….

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   1. 

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2. WOTD from Ezra Klein at Vox: “The Conservative Dilemma“

   Klein reviews a new book called “Let them eat Tweets::

   How do you keep winning elections and cutting taxes for the rich in a (putative) democracy where the top 1 percent went from 11 percent of national income in 1980 to 20 percent in 2016, and the bottom 50 percent fell from 21 percent of national income in 1980 to 13 percent in 2016? How do you keep your party from being buried by the 99 percent banding together to vote that income share back into their own pockets?

   …

   In their new book, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson offer three possible answers. You can cease being a party built around tax cuts for the rich and try to develop an economic agenda that will appeal to the middle class. You can try to change the political topic, centering politics on racial, religious, and nationalist grievance. Or you can try to undermine democracy itself.

   “To advance an unpopular plutocratic agenda, Republicans have escalated white backlash — and, increasingly, undermined democracy,” Hacker and Pierson write. “In the United States, then, plutocracy and right-wing populism have not been opposing forces. Instead, they have been locked in a doom loop of escalating extremism that must be disrupted.

   This is their synthesis of the great economic anxiety versus racial resentment debate. Republican elites weaponize racial resentment to win voters who would otherwise vote their economic self-interest. Hacker and Pierson are careful to sidestep the crude version that holds that ethnic and religious division are mere distractions. Voters see racial and religious dominance as political interests as compelling and legitimate as tax benefits, and the demand for politicians to reflect those underlying resentments and fears is real.

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3. Hiroshima Day.

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   1. On the topic of thing that go BOOM, that ammonium nitrate in Lebanon was intended to be explosive: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-security-blast-ship/beiruts-accidental-cargo-how-an-unscheduled-port-visit-led-to-disaster-idUSKCN25225M

       

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4. The aforementioned unintended consequences of Dump’s weaponization of Covid-19 in comics form:

   Crypt of Murder: Death by Donald

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5. Eighty nine days to election Day.

   You could say we’re Biden our time.

   Live joyously like our Righteous Cook

   Then eighty eight days will end Trump’s crime.

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6. Rapper Kanye West, who is attempting to mount an independent presidential campaign, has been approved for Colorado’s Nov. 3 ballot, the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office said Thursday..

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   1. Aargh.i know people who would vote for him. They suck up all the “Biden is diminished” crap ads. They’re not registered to vote, though. Time for a talk from Honorary Auntie.

      See comment on another thread for how frigging nuts it is to allow Presidential ballot access, while requiring prohibitive signature gathering from down ballot candidates. 

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   2. When do we get to see the 9 voters who say they are supporting him and will serve as Electors?  Mocking will be mandatory.

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      1. In Wisconsin the person turning in the petitions was on the list of the Dump campaign’s representation, as recently as last week, suing Priorities USA to force removal of an anti-Dump ad.

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